Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To and today I'm going to show you how to convert
all your corner points to smooth points in Adobe Illustrator. Well, almost all your
corner points - I'll show you what I mean here in a second. Alright, let's get started. If you're
looking for a quick fix, the idea is to select all the points, then hit A on your keyboard to
get to your Direct Selection tool, hold SHIFT and deselect one of the points, then come up here to
convert the selected anchor points to smooth. And it will smooth out all of those except the one
that you did not select....then you can just select that one and come up and do that one by
itself. Alright, let's delete this. In case you're wondering a little bit more about these tools,
and how we got to that point, I'm going to go over that now. As you probably know, the way to make a
corner point is just to get on your pen tool over here and click a few times in different places.
To make a smooth point, you can just click and then click and drag. And this will make a smooth
point. As you just saw, there's a way to convert all of your corner points to smooth points,
and vice versa. And that's right up here in the Control Panel. If you don't have this panel open,
you can go to Window > Control right here. And this panel changes based on what's selected.
So if you're not seeing this tool, just use your A tool or Direct Selection,
just click on the edge of your object and those will show up.
Okay, I'm going to delete these two things. And now I'm going to hit M to draw a rectangle.
I'll hit V and then hold OPTION or ALT to make a duplicate. Now I'm going to select one corner
point up here by hitting A on my keyboard to get to the Direct Selection tool, and then just
highlighting one point. That'll make our Convert Anchor Point tools show up up here. And then I'll
just click on the second one to create a smooth anchor point. Now this is a little bit different
from what happens when you round a corner. To do that, I'll select this point over here, and then
I'll just grab this white circle and pull this in. And you can see the difference between the two.
In the first example, Illustrator is basically trying to guess where you went the curve based on
where these other points fall. With round corners, we're just taking the corner in and rounding it
off. So let's draw an angular fish shape with the Pen tool. I'll hit P, and then I will click...and
make sure not to click and drag as you do this. Otherwise, it will make a smooth point.
Now we can select some of these points and convert them to smooth. I'll hit A on my keyboard and I'm
going to select these three, and I'll hold SHIFT and select this line at the bottom.
Now I'm just going to create smooth points for those. And you can see that this angle
down here is a different angle than this one up here. And that's because it's trying to judge
based on the other points up there. Now the weird thing about this is if we select everything on the
page with CMD A or CTRL A, our little tools are gone. Even if we're on the Direct Selection tool,
they don't show up up here. For some reason, those tools don't like to convert all anchor points
in a document. But you saw the workaround at the beginning - you can just hit A hold SHIFT and just
deselect any point and then they come back, then we can go ahead and round all the rest of them.
Now we can also use this on a non closed path. So I'm going to hit P on my keyboard and just draw a
zigzag shape. I'll hit SHIFT X to switch the fill and the stroke. So now I just have a black stroke.
Alright, now we can do the same thing. I've got the whole path selected, so I don't have my tools.
But I can hit A, I'm going to hold SHIFT and deselect the endpoint.
Then we can come up here and convert them to smooth and you can see it does a pretty good job.
I'm going to undo and copy this and then redo and paste just to show you the difference of what it
looks like with the round corners. So I'll hit A on my keyboard and I'll just pull these white ones
as far as they'll go. So it gives you quite a bit different results. Okay,
so I'm going to open a graphic that I downloaded from Vecteezy.com. This one's got a lot of corner
points. So I'm going to select all with CMD A or CTRL A on a PC. And now I'm going to deselect
any point. I'll just choose this one and now I come up and convert everything to smooth.
You can see the results. It even changed the background and made it into a completely
different looking landscape. Now this video is about converting corner to smooth, but of course
you can reverse the process and convert smooth to corner. So I'm going to open another graphic
that I got from Vecteezy. This one is a circle icon set, and I'll do the same, I'll select all.
I'll deselect one point, and then I'll convert everything to corner points.
And now we have a bunch of diamond icons instead. So I hope this video has helped you
see the power of these tools, they can really be helpful in the right situation.
Alright, if you liked this video, and you like the way I teach, I also teach full courses out
on Skillshare. And if you have a membership over there, you can watch them all for free!
If you don't, you can get a free trial, and there's a link in my description for that
if you want to just click on that. Alright, I'll see you in the next video. Thank you!!!